Content for Blog to America is completely generated by the readers. This site brings together individuals from around the world to post their opinions on the United States in the form of letters and comments. Our site aims to encourage global communication and create an international dialogue between America and the world. The most interesting of these letters and comments will be included in a future publication.

I'm traveling to New York and Washington for the first time in a few weeks. The prospect of going to New York is thrilling. For my whole life I have watched American films and here will be my first chance to see the many landmarks featured in these movies.

I recently saw Saturday Night Fever a wonderful evocation of 70s life in Brooklyn. I saw The Squid and the Whale, too, which is an evocation of Brooklyn in the 1980s. I love the sense of place these films create. The dialogue, and the observations of aspirations and fears, I find fascinating.

I've booked my Sopranos tour, which will take me round all the settings I have grown familiar with, watching six series (or is it seven?) of that amazing drama. I'm looking forward to seeing the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and the kind of streets that are featured in The Godfather, Sex in the City and Woody Allen films.

Having had the reputation of being a low-brow culture, the Americans in the last decade have redefined television and its possibilities. I'm a fanatical fan of Alan Ball's Six Feet Under. It's a wonderful series which confronts viewers with all the really big questions. It's funny, profound and moving.

I particularly enjoy the ethnic mix which series like the Sopranos and Six Feet Under explore. For seven years I lived in Bayswater in London. It was a tough place to survive, and the English were a community among many other communities.

London is America these days. The idea of a nation state, an England that is for the English, is defunct. As a culture we are not very good at expressing or depicting this new world we live in. The Americans do it beautifully.

I had written an angry satirical article about the new film Charlie Wilson's War, which I have not seen yet, except for extensive excerpts on a History Channel documentary. It purported to be the real story of the late Rep. Charlie Wilson, and had him chortling, I love it as the right-wing Muslim guerrillas whom he and the Reagan administration massively funded through Pakistan and hailed as freedom fighters were about to triumph over the evil Soviet empire.

I was advised to keep my review on tap until I had seen the film, which is reasonable advice.

Yet, Benazir Bhutto was murdered in Pakistan yesterday and the murder, as I see it, has a direct relationship to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the subject of Charlie Wilson's War.

Afghanistan's history from the late 1970s to the present is very complicated. The country itself was one of the poorest in the world, divided along ethnic tribal lines and long a battleground among great powers, for example, in the 19th century between the British and czarist Russian empires.

Afghanistan bordered the Soviet Union, and ethnic groups who also were part of the Soviet Union were minority populations in Afghanistan. The Soviets had helped to educate a significant number of Afghanis and an influential Communist Party existed in the city of Kabul. Feudal and prefeudal nomadic elites were predominant in much of the country and theMuslim religion was the primary unifying force.

Afghani Communists took power in Kabul in 1978, faced with threats from the newly established brutal military dictatorship in Pakistan, and also hoping to advance a social revolution, bringing mass education, land reform and other vital social reforms to the people.

The Pakistani military dictator General Zia had publicly executed Muhammad Ali Bhutto, the civilian prime minister whom he overthrew (father of Benazir Bhutto). Zia wasnt the first Pakistani military dictator but he was the worst. His regime turned more and more to rightistclerical elements as a base of support and also worked with Saudis to establish right-wing religious primary schools in a country where large sections of the population, including a large majority of the female population, were totally illiterate.

Afghani Communists, tragically, were unable to achieve the unity that is a prerequisite for all communist parties everywhere to keep a coalition together and make pro-people gains. They were divided into rival factions which fought each other fiercely over policy. Despite all thegains made, there were disastrous errors in seeking to advance the revolution into the countryside, great ineptitude in the land reform policy among cadre with a limited understanding of agriculture, and an aggressive self-defeating anti-clericalism in response to the clerical opposition to the revolution.

With the Pakistani military dictatorship under Zia aiding right-wing Muslim guerrillas, President Jimmy Carters National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski defeated Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and gained Carters support to use the CIA to provide aid to the guerrillas.Brzezinski saw this aid as creating an Afghan trap for the Soviets, manipulating them into a military intervention which, he hoped, would be their Vietnam.

The Soviets did intervene at the end of 1979 to both save the Kabul government, an ally, and advance a social revolution against fiercely reactionary clerically based forces. For the Soviets, the intervention was both a protection of their own borders and also a reassertion ofproletarian internationalist aid for people seeking to make a social revolution against the forces of internal reaction and foreign imperialism.

CIA aid to the Afghan freedom fighters was picking up under the Reagan administration, which used the advertising term Evil Empire, before the real Charlie Wilson got into the act, although Wilson did play the role of a political fixer, using his position on the HouseIntelligence Committee to get more and more money and military aid to the freedom fighters while he ran around Afghanistan for many colorful photo ops.

Large numbers of refugees were created by the Afghan war and great atrocities, as there are in all modern wars. In the U.S. and capitalist media, the Soviets were blamed for these atrocities and large sections of the Euro-American left pretty much went along with the view that thiswas a battle between David and Goliath in which the social issues were unimportant compared to the Soviet bad guys and the Afghani anti-imperialist good guys.

However, Indian media particularly, along with other non-Soviet sources, emphasized the fanaticism and crimes committed by the guerillas, including the atrocities that they committed against Soviet military personnel, their families, and those Afghani people whom they saw ascollaborators women seeking to go to schools that the Communist government had established, people seeking to free themselves from the domination of CIA-supported gunmen who might beat them brutally if their beards weren't long enough.

While the real Charlie Wilson was running around with U.S. congressmen,General Zia and Afghan mujahedeen, the CIA was recruiting tens of thousands of foreign fighters from Muslim countries and training them in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas to attack Afghanistan. Money for this war was not only raised from the U.S. appropriations but fromheroin traffic that led Pakistan in the 1990s to have the highest per capita number of heroin addicts in the world.

Benazir Bhutto became prime minister briefly after General Zias death and the restoration of civilian rule. She returned as prime minister in the mid 1990s. The people of Pakistan, less directly than the people of Afghanistan but more so than any other people, suffered from thecounter-revolutionary guerrilla war that Reagan and Zia carried forward against Afghanistan.

As Mikhail Gorbachev began a policy of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, Al Qaeda, or the Base, was founded in 1988 under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, leader of the Saudi Arabian contingent of anti-Communist fighters in Afghanistan, scion of one of thewealthiest capitalist families in the region, and both fundraiser and major logistical man for the guerrillas, much admired at the time by the CIA with whom he had worked for many years.

The Communist-led government in Kabul was eventually destroyed. In Afghanistan, a warlord terror regime was followed by the ultra-right clerical Taliban regime, whose attempts to terrorize its own people into accepting universal female illiteracy, the primacy of a literalistinterpretation of religious law and misery and poverty in this life as a necessity for the next shocked the people throughout the world.

With the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, Osama bin Laden, who, regardless of his CIA friends, had long seen the U.S. and the West as both a sink of sin and a legion of Christian Crusaders and Jewish Zionists seeking to conquer Islam, substituted the U.S. for the Soviet Union as his main enemy, and, setting himself up in Afghanistan with the wholehearted support of the Taliban government that he and the CIA had largely created, began to launch the attacks that led eventually to the destruction of the World Trade Center.

By then, the CIA was much more interested in covering up its long-term relationship with bin Laden than really doing much about him. Its Pakistani intelligence allies were heavily compromised and infiltrated with Al Qaeda and Taliban supporters, and bin Laden family money was around. So U.S. authorities werent that keen on investigating the activities of the bin Laden black sheep Osama.

Today, Al Qaeda and Taliban forces attack the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan from the base areas that the CIA and the Pakistani ISI used to attack the Soviet-supported Communist government over 20 years ago.

Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, has been murdered under the regime of the present military dictator, who imprisoned and held her husband in jail for years without formal charges, along with many other opponents of the dictatorship, just as her father was in effect murdered by the previous military dictator.

And of course, Pakistan does have weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, which it has developed as part of its ongoing conflict with India.

I said at the beginning that I wasn't going to write a review of Charlie Wilsons War until I see the film, but I think this final comment on its advertising is merited. In the commercials for the film, a narrator says with a straight face that without Charlie Wilson history would have been sadly different. Different perhaps, but unless one is a sadist, a masochist, or a reactionary who loves war and destruction for the hell of it, whether it is the destruction of the World Trade Center or the invasion of Iraq happily, not sadly, different.

By: Norman N

C/o: Laila-Shansi

About the Author:

Name: Laila-ShansiAge: 55Country: IranCity: TehranGender: FemaleIncome: LowOccupation: FIRED!Experience With US: Never Visited the United States

Some people misunderstood my last letter and thought I meant to attack America, and that was not the case.

In fact, I'm one of the few pro-US and pro-Israel people here, and I tend to support the US in its wars.

Because, I mean, without the US going to Iraq, those who are now complaining and attacking the US would still be attacking it anyway, but then it would have been for the reason that the US did NOT help them.

Iraq is now a democratic country, they have cellphones, satellite channels, newspapers, political parties, political debates, political differences, and even political fights. But would they have ever dreamed of any of that if it wasn't for America?

Same thing for Afghanistan. They wouldn't have even been able to dream about being a democracy, or having even if just a little bit of religious freedom, and being in contact with the world around them. Women would still be made to cover up from head to toe.

Some people in here like to treat America as if it's their mother or something (maybe because it's a super-power). They just like to keep complaining under all circumstances, and America is expected to always make them feel better.

Iranians can't differentiate between Democrats and Republicans. Though their promises and programs have "interior consumption" but the two party's foreign policy is almost the same. Imagine the absence of Persians' burning desires for solution of human rights demands amid Democrat's diplomacy on open and unconditional talks on oil, nuclear weapon.. and promises of "rose garden" to our governors!

On the other hand, your foreign policy is under control of behind scene lobbyists and the CIA's actions. The U.S. nightmare is middle-east nations' awareness, a risky factor for immunize and assurance of America's benefits.

The solution : putting these areas in crisis in which CIA experts know how to do that perfectly!.

Unfortunately, the ancient civilized non-Arab PERSIA, a place for westerners gambling and competition, locates in this hell. Persians and world historical memory never forget American COUP against our Beloved, Nationalist Prime Minister Mr. Mosaddegh, the leader of independence movement for freedom in the 50's. For that coup, marked protesters and opponents were imprisoned, tortured and killed. CIA destroyed Persians' any signs of hope to manage better life forever.

Current unacceptable frustrating situation of Iran is the results of untold solidarity among Britain, the Soviet Union, and America's past wrongful interfere to our country's interior affairs.

We also observe rapid growth of fanatic ideology of extremism inside and outside our borders, thanks to CIA's previous financially supports and training of Islamic extremists to combat against USSR's trace in Afghanistan and now a huge threat to World Peace.

Catch your smart trainees, so called freedom-fighters and now Islamic extremist enemy, if you can !! and keep them from charging innocent people.

I am a Malaysian of Chinese descent. In trade, politics, fashion and especially mass media, America or the US (as we like to call you here) affects us tremendously. Since the late 50s, after we got our independence from Britain, the American influence was all mighty from Elvis Presley and Western cowboy movies. America was the hero, the great country. They brought down the Germans and the Japanese. Our leaders admired you so much that they borrow the stripes of your flag for our new one.

However, of late, your heroic image has taken a dark change. Because of our multi racial and multi religious nature, we are seeing America through colored lenses. Our Malay and Muslim brothers hate the Americans for their war against terrorism which affects Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and the perceived bias for Israel. To the economically vibrant Chinese community here, the key American business role here is increasingly being taken over by an ever stronger China.

I would like to see an America that continues to fight for the weak, the besieged and the poor. The war against terror has taken a paradigm shift that future generations might see as a fight against the weak.

Your government, not to mention your political system, has failed you. George W Bush has failed you. There are many reasons why I feel that your government has failed you, I hope I can clarify why during the course of this letter.

Your government has failed you at the most basic level. The overriding job of any government is to protect its citizens. That is a fundamental foundation of any civilised nation. Sadly, your government has chosen not to protect its citizens. Instead, it has decided to cut you loose and see if you sink or swim. Inevitably, it is the poor who sink. Take for example the recent legislation rejected by President Bush. Bush had a chance to ensure that every section of society was given the ability to swim. When presented with a bill to extend health insurance to millions of children, he could have chosen to embrace American society and ensure every member of the society was given an equal chance in life, regardless of their financial background. However, he chose (for the fourth time in seven years) to reject this legislation and ensure that millions of the poorest children will be left to sink, to disappear from mainstream society and remain a part of the so-called ‘under-class’. From birth, it would appear that the American government has chosen not to protect its citizens and thus renege on its obligations as a civilised nation.

It is not just in terms of healthcare, the American system (particularly under Bush) has displayed a blatant disregard for the ordinary working man/woman. Many Americans were proud of their achievement of being the ‘Most Productive’ workers, according to a UN report. But this reputation has come at a heavy price. Once again, the political leadership had a choice: protect the citizen, or allow them to sink. Once again, Bush chose the latter. Despite their reputation, the American worker suffers intolerable working standards. Unionisation is practically obsolete, with only 12.5% of workers owning union membership in 2005. Under Bush’s watch, the minimum wage has dropped from $5.84 in 2000 to $5.15 in 2005, the median family income dropped by $1,000 between 200 and 2004 and the lowest quintile saw its annual income after tax decrease by $200, while the top 1% saw their incomes grow by $53,000. The workers have been left to sink by Bush, while the wealthy continue to swim at a healthy pace.

The Bush administration has also failed to protect the rights of the indigenous people of America. When given the opportunity to vote on a treaty that set out the rights of the indigenous people, including protection of their human rights and their land, the United States was one of only four countries to vote against the treaty. Once again, we see how the Bush administration fails to abide by its obligations to protect all its citizens. In fact, its treatment of indigenous people has also been condemned by Amnesty International. Amnesty has claimed that:

Native American and Alaska Native women in the United States suffer disproportionately high levels of rape and sexual violence, yet the federal government has created substantial barriers to accessing justice, Amnesty International (AI) asserted in a 113-page report released today. Justice Department figures indicate that American Indian and Alaska Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than women in the United States in general; more than one in three Native women will be raped in their lifetimes.

Native Americans are, like many other sections of society, left to sink to the bottom. The Bush administration has washed their hands of them, much like the poor and the workers.

But it is not just internal affairs that the Bush administration has failed the American people and endangered them, foreign policy has put America at risk like never before. The sympathy spawned from the attacks on 11th September, has been squandered as the US government seeks it tighten its grip on the world. However, the tighter they squeeze, the more anti-Americanism will grow. This in turn will lead to greater difficulties on the world stage and America’s increased isolation from the civilised world. This isolation will make all Americans vulnerable and put them at great risk. If current trends in foreign policy were to continue, the entire nation will sink without a trace.

In short, the American administration has done its best to ensure that the poor and the dispossessed sink to the bottom, while the wealthy rise to the top. If America is ever going to regain its status as a respected, civilised nation, it needs to stop threatening sovereign nations of the world and start focusing on the needs of the poor in their own country. Martin Luther King once said:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have never been to your shores, but I feel that I need to share with you the important role which your country (and all it stands for) has played in my life. I was born in Germany in 1969. My parents were both War children. They were 5 when the Allies marched into what was left of the Reich. Mum grew up in the British sector and has many heart-breaking memories, not only of being bombed out twice, of a brother in a concentration camp due to political activity and of seeing her father killed, but also of the occupation time, when British soldiers were none too kind to little German urchins. My father however, lived in the American Sector. His war time experiences were just as horrific, but the evil was over (according to him) when the 'Amis' rolled into the little town. Initially immensely fearful, the American soldiers won him over with smiles, chocolate and rides on tanks. He describes how he realized (even as a little boy) that his family had been lied to about the Americans - that they were fair and kind, not imperialistic and cruel. He learned elementary English hanging around America soldiers. His family began to receive CARE parcels packed in the US and sent to starving families in occupied Germany. For the first time in all of his life (born in 1939), my dad and his siblings had enough to eat and even some small luxuries. My dad's impressions and recollections have had a profound effect on my own opinion- not so much of America (as a political idea...too much abject nonsense has happened recently), but of the basis of American democracy and human rights. I know from Dad that military intervention is possible for all the right reasons. It does not have to do with oil, etc. My German family never saw the Americans as anything other than liberators and enablers. I still believe in you and I will teach my children to do so also. God bless America.

About the Author:

Name: YfiAge: 38Country: AustraliaGender: FemaleOccupation: TeacherExperience With US: Never Visited the United States

Excuse me if my English isn't perfect but I guess you will understand what i want to say.

I just want to say that I despise and hate the USA. The USA have forgotten it's rebellious origin and it's liberation fight against the British Empire. Since the end of World War II they've become an empire themselves. They suppress people around the whole world and can't accept that there are more and more of them which shit on the mendacious so called American way of life. They talk about democracy and freedom but they're just interested in might and money. In Vietnam they supported a dictator which canceled the elections because he saw that he won't win them. And then the USA fought against the justified peoples resistance. In Chile the USA pushed a cruel dictator with in neighbour states trained personal terrorists and local people's suppressors to the government and crushed a wonderful socialist democracy and a peoples president (Allende). In Grenada it was almost the same, except of the fact, that the USA lead the Invasion by themselves. They destroyed social hopes of the people and supported dictators!Especially Latin America was suppressed by that new age empire which thought the whole continent belongs to them and other countries there are just cheap and obeying satellites.

And then take a look at more current times. The USA raid the Iraq and tell us something about mass destruction weapons and liberation but these all are damn lies. There are no mass destruction weapons in the Iraq - unfortunately, because this would have been an impressive defensive measure against evil Invaders from west. The USA have surely more mass destruction weapons than any other nation but dare to forbid and allow other countries to have it or not. The Iraq had been no threat for the world but the USA proved many times that they are. Is there a nation which lead more wars? The USA always fight in foreign countries and dare to talk about defense. In Iraq they just want oil and a bigger presence in the Arab region. They want to expand they're new age empire, like Romans have done in the past. But notice: every empire failed one day. ;-)

The USA expands mass poverty inside the nation and in the world. They keep an evil political system which ends always in crisis- like in world war 2- and in which the absolute majority of all people just can lose. Capitalism is a dark realm of a rich minority- and this means that the system cant work. But the USA defend it despite of that and cause desperation, suppression and poverty. It's not surprising that the resistance in the world against that special kind of terrorism is getting bigger and bigger. The USA talk about cowardly "terrorists" but just dare to fight them miles away from the air with missiles. THIS is cowardly. And they absolutely cant distinguish between origin and result- like the most rulers. They cant or they just don't want.

And take a look inside, man. Over 35 millions in the USA live already in extreme poverty and more and more people have to do two or three jobs a day just to survive. This is no live and no good circumstance. This is f*cking hell- the American way of existing. And it's getting worse and worse. There are so large differences of wealth- and it's a damn minority which has and gets it almost all. This is no justice. And this global tyranny of a rich minority and especially the government of the USA want to force the rest oft all mankind to accepts this system and suffer for it. But we won't- we won't. We don't let us influence by the naive US-propaganda as such easy as us-Americans. ;-) And even they will more and more wake up in the face of that failing capitalistic hell.

Yours Redwing- German neosocialist and webfighter :-)

A hail to the revolution!

PS: Thanks to your mad president because he showed the rest oft the world the true face of the USA better than many presidents before!

About the Author:

Name: RedwingAge: 28Country: GermanyCity: BremenState: BremenGender: MaleIncome: LowExperience With US: Never Visited the United States

I really don't know from were I should start. From my own problems to the Iraqi's, generally it's been nearly two years since I stopped writing and the main reason was the disappointing situation...yes the disappointing. Is this the new Iraq? This was what we wished to have? Is this the new style of life? At the beginning every thing was okay, and we were saying "no problem". The important thing was we got rid of the dictatorship there. We are after four and half years later and Iraq has gone from dictatorship to the old dark ages. Iraq the country of nations and foundation of humanity sinking in rivers of blood and killings and poorness and thieves and only the name stayed Iraq and every thing else is gone. Who is responsible? Is it us or the others?All we wanted was simple things. Is it hard to have a these things without these losses? It was very expensive payment, my heart is breaking, and I see my country loses everything...even the simple things that we didn't want anymore.

You may wish to know that your continent is surrounded by vast areas of the world that wish you no specific harm. I refer, of course, to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Everywhere else has it in for you. I mean it. Even loyal serfs like South Korea are turning against you, despite the fact that they have clearly modeled their flag on your excellent PepsiCola product (mmm mmm). Poll after global poll finds that most people consider the United States the world's most greatest threat to peace. Like you, and dear President Bush, I have not the slightest understanding of how this state of affairs can have come about, but I am told that it may have something to do with the habit of American governments to initiate wars and, where they don't initiate them, to escalate them to insane peaks of global danger, from the threat to use atomic weapons against North Korea in 1950-1, to the refusal to reunify Germany as a neutral state and the subsequent threat of a hot war with Kruschev, to the Cuban missile crisis in which Kennedy contemplate global nuclear war.

I am further informed that opinion was soured by near-genocidal violence in Korea after the march past the 38th parallel, in Vietnam before and after the march across the 19th parallel, and in the remainder of Indochina in the same period. The use of right-wing dictatorships and death squads to avert outcomes unamenable to American elite interests has also invested an otherwise fine continental principality with a suspicious poo-taint. Lately, certain people (namely, the world) have taken exception to a global war for dominance counterintuitively dubbed the 'war on terror'. I respect and trust Americans too much to believe that they have ever been taken in by that appelation, but it is now beyond your province, and mine.

Amreekans will naturally understand that I personally would wish to enhance their global standing and protect them from global wrath. May I therefore recommend you take the earliest opportunity to overthrow your government, socialise the means of production, distribution and exchange under the control of democratic workers councils, reduce your massive 'defense' industry to what is necessary to defend your land mass and only your land mass, and convert the trillions spent on war-making into useful production and services. Not only would it benefit most Americans to so transform their conditions, but it would also invite countless billions to relax their batties and stop dragging the stars and stripes across the epicentre of their chutney pipes each morning.

Meanwhile, I and my Bolshevik armies will sneak up on America via the Panama Canal and - d'oh!

About the Author:

Name: LeninAge: 30Country: United KingdomCity: LondonGender: MaleExperience With US: Never Visited the United StatesWebsite: http://leninology.blogspot.com